writer, editor, pop culture geek

sexuality

Short desk lunch today because my writing project has actually started to take root in my brain and that leaves very little left for literally anything else word-related. As always: check out what I shared on The Rumpus, where I was coherent for like, entire minutes at a time.

This is why I believe in intoxication — because it is true to say I believe in it, though I have given it up: drunk, none of us is any better than any other. When drunk we are not trying to be great. When drunk we are fine with the abject instead. I like the way that everyone turns for now toward the abject, as if it is a home.

Brought to you this week by the Wet Hot American Summer prequel. I’ve allowed it to consume my entire life this week and I’m pretty okay with that! Why does Bradley Cooper only seem truly happy when he’s falling in love with Michael Ian Black? IS IT… ACTING?

My Where We Are viewing experience was transformative, but not in the way I expected. I didn’t start a 1D Tumblr or troll Twitter for band rumours…. I did stop policing myself and other girls, both onscreen and off. I relaxed, and I had fun. I didn’t care about being the coolest girl in the room, because the coolest girls in the room were the ones not thinking about male critics. They were just having fun.

I’ll probably never tire of articles about fandom, but this one has a strong section specifically about the gendered language to describe stadium-sized events. Sports events vs boyband concerts: WHICH IS THE GREATER THREAT? All that and more blood-boiling sexism that permeates our every waking moment!

No, the Atlantic, your very detailed photo essay isn’t like a trip to Antarctica, but it does very much make me want to go to Antarctica. Caption for this photo: A whale fossil is seen near Brazil’s Commandante Ferraz Antarctic Station, located in Admiralty Bay, King George Island, Antarctica, on November 25, 2008. #

Right, right, right. I talk about that as the logic of homosexual necessity in the book and that comes up a lot, this claim that, well, men have to do this for X or Y reason. There’s simply no other choice. I think people are really committed to that idea because it means that men are not agentically choosing homosexuality as something that is happening to them, so it’s what keeps their heterosexual identity intact, when that’s the logic that applies.

This Science of Us interview runs along similar lines to the “Born This Way” piece I linked to last week, but this one explores the way that self-identified straight men justify homosexual acts in the frame of their suffocatingly rigid masculinity. Homosexuality and homosexual acts could never be choices; they have to be explained away or, I don’t know, the ice caps would melt and poison the oceans and drown every coastal metropolis in the world and drive civilization into a frenzied competition for the last of our natural resources!

On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public’s attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065.

Speaking of our dwindling natural resources, here’s a piece in Rolling Stone letting us know that within 50 years our ecosystem will very likely drop a brick on the accelerator and destroy our precarious grip on order and civilization. Ecosystem will then heave our screaming, flaming corpse out of the car and drive us into the ocean, so… I guess I’ll keep contributing to that 403(b).